by Pico Iyer
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In Japan, it pays to try not to lose (rather than to win), because a game ends in a tie if the score is level after four hours and twelve innings. In each of my first two years in Japan, the team with the most victories in the Pacific League, one of the country’s two professional divisions, failed to claim the pennant because a team with fewer victories had more ties—and thus enjoyed a higher winning percentage.
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My Tigers set a record for most home runs in a season in 1985. But they set a record that same season for most sacrifice bunts. Japanese players sacrifice up to three times more often than their American counterparts, a reminder that caution is enjoined even for the most powerful.
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In the Japan Series, the country’s modestly titled answer to the World Series, a Fighting Spirit Award is given each year to the most valuable player on the losing squad.
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“Americans take their strength in victories,” writes Don Winslow in The Cartel, his epic novel about narcotraficantes. “Mexicans’ strength is in their ability to suffer loss.”
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Old World cultures cherish grace in defeat because they know we all lose in the end; New World cultures remain confident they can keep destiny at bay, perhaps forever.
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In any case, winning is seen in a larger context in Japan. Sometimes foreign players will get walked with the bases loaded (so some cherished record can remain in Japanese hands).
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Every August, TV stations across the country—including the government-run Educational Channel—broadcast the high-school baseball championships from Koshien from breakfast time till after dark, day after day for fifteen days. The ground on which the young emblems of purity enact their rites is so sacred that, as with certain temples, no woman is allowed to set foot on it.
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There are no names on the white uniforms of the players on the forty-nine teams, and the teenagers are generally as shaven-headed as monks. When they’re awarded walks, they sprint to first base.
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From the age of nine, Ichiro Suzuki admitted—he had been taken by his father to a batting cage every day, for four hours, from the age of seven—he had “five to six hours [in a year] to play with friends.”
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In the New World, players are taken out of a game after throwing a hundred pitches; in Japan, pitchers in spring training have been known to throw four hundred and two pitches in a day, leading to brilliant careers that die as quickly as cherry blossoms.
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When I arrived in Japan, the country was importing its stars from the Americas; now it exports its stars and more often imports its managers. The ability to lead is harder to find in the land of hesitation than the ability to follow.
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A runner steals second base in a game his team is leading by twelve to two.
“Shameless!” I cry. “In America, that would be regarded as bush-league: to humiliate a team that is already having its face rubbed in the dirt.”
“Is it better to go easy on them, treating them as kids?” asks my wife. “Isn’t that a worse kind of humiliation?”
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In a game between a Japanese squad and some visiting American all-stars, in November 2014, I watch the Japanese starting pitcher throw a perfect game for five innings, and then get taken out.
Is this so he won’t humiliate the guests? To give others a chance to share in the glory? Because he’d been allocated only five innings?
I can only conclude that Yogi Berra was right: “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
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In the final game of the Japan Series, with the entire seven-month season on the line, suddenly, in the middle of the ninth inning, as one hundred and forty-six games come to their five-minute climax, the screen fills with ads for detergent. Another program is scheduled to begin at 9:00 p.m., and the prearranged schedule takes precedence over even the most exciting moment of the year.
ON THE HORIZON
SPIRITS FROM THE PAST
The ghosts in Japan speak only Japanese, I’m tempted to believe; I’ve never been visited by one. Often I’ll walk impervious through a Japanese graveyard at dead of night while my wife cowers at the mere thought of it. Yet the presence of the past, a constant awareness of tradition and superstition, the influence of forefathers, can overwhelm me here, much more than in the Old World places where I grew up.
There we had ritual and precedents more than the specific wisdom of ancestors; we were surrounded by images and mementos of the dead, rather than of those who could be regarded as still living. But in Japan, death is not so much the opposite of life as its adjoining chamber, in a house of sliding panels. My neighbors make very strict distinctions between work and play, man and woman, foreigner and local, as if to tame a world in which the most essential things seldom honor hard-and-fast distinctions. The past is never behind us, and it’s not easy to say where this moment ends and the time of the ancestors begins.
One cold winter night, I was standing beside a bed in a hospital, three blocks from Kyoto’s eighth-century pagoda, when the pulse reading on a monitor began to sink. From 53 and 62 down to 36, 34, 31. Up again to 73, 106, 81, but then down to 24, 21, 27. When, at last, the red numeral settled at “0,” and all our ministrations failed to coax it back up to 51, 63, 117, the dead woman’s loved ones didn’t stop talking to her, smoothing her hair, saying thank you to her. The sweet young nurse on duty suggested she not ask a doctor to come in to pronounce the woman dead for thirty or forty minutes, so late-arriving family could continue to greet the woman as if she were still alive.
For the next two days, no one around seemed to think twice about congratulating the ninety-year-old corpse on her calm, staring with fond delight at her waxen face and rigor mortis and—as would continue more or less for decades—taking cans of her favorite beer to place by her coffin and putting out food for her at every meal. She was still among us, even if more silent than she had been.
“I’ve always been afraid of Japan,” said a friend from England, brought over for two weeks by a husband who’d been stationed here during the Occupation and was guiding her everywhere with the Japanese he’d retained. “And now I see I was right to be. It’s so foreign, so different from anywhere I’ve seen. I mean, I’ve been to China and India, and India was shocking, but I loved it. This is different.”
We were sitting in a California café in central Nara, surrounded by wooden temples and orange lanterns leading to the most sacred shrine in the land outside of Ise. She was staying in an elegant inn near the biggest Buddha on the planet, and her husband moved among the shops and restaurants as easily as if he were at home. The four of us had often met like this in London. But none of that was consoling to her.
“Before I came here, a friend in England told me, ‘Japan is the future.’ And, yes, that’s true of Tokyo. Tokyo is the future. But everything else in Japan is deep, deep past. The bullet train whizzes you along, the cell phones all but live for you, the toilet seats leap up and make noises and even clean themselves when they’re not talking to you. But you have to wear a special set of slippers just to go to the toilet. It’s all custom, even the way you open the door to go to the loo.”
It’s true. We start amidst the giddy, amusement-park surfaces here, but very quickly begin to fall down an ever-deepening well where no lights are visible.
“I’m sorry,” she went on, “I know you love it….”
“No,” I said, “I know what you mean. In a way, you’re
explaining why I live here. It’s a riddle, and a rich and dense and grave one, often. I can’t begin to imagine I know the first thing about it. I can’t tell you what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know who Hiroko will be next month—what she’ll love, where she’ll be in the cycle of her life, what new forms of old tradition she’ll expect me to understand. It keeps me on my toes, alert.
“I suppose, if one’s job, one’s life is trying to live with the things one can’t understand, then Japan is the biggest prize. Because it’s the ultimate challenge.”
“Yes,” she said, clearly relieved she’d be back in London a few days later. “I suppose I can see that.”
As I walked home, through the barely lit park that sits at the heart of the old capital, a twelve-hundred-year-old pagoda outlined in the distance, the “whee”-ing deer among the trees, I thought how much this side of the country begins to take root inside the visitor who stays here for a while.
Lafcadio Hearn, after his initial infatuation with the prettiness and courtesies of Japan, began to give himself over to excavating ghost stories, the “goblin” presences he felt all around him and what he called, eerily, “the sacrificial past…within.” In the wake of the tsunami in 2011, there was a rush on exorcisms as “hungry ghosts”—those abruptly taken from the earth without time to prepare for another world—were said to cluster around northern Japan, often speaking through the living, and unprepared priests were obliged to expel demons.
My old friend Bill Powers, from MIT’s Media Lab, was conducting a seminar near Kyoto in 2017 when the conversation turned to artificial intelligence. One of the high-level Japanese executives present—from a celebrated international communications company—said that the great blessing of artificial intelligence would be that it might allow us to converse more easily with the dead.
“I’d never thought of it like that,” Bill said to me next day.
“Which of us would? That cutting-edge technology might be not so much about surging into the future as more freely accessing the wise ghosts of the past?”
Sometimes Japan seems more than ready to change itself on the surface precisely so that it will never have to change deep down.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE?
“The new day is almost here,” writes Haruki Murakami in After Dark, “but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side—which world—contains his center of gravity.”
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Japan in the postwar years—this is Murakami’s setting, his lament—has a door that’s permanently half open.
“Are you coming in or going out?” one might ask the entire culture.
To which the answer—in a land of American surfaces and non-American values—is a shrug.
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At the end of his hugely popular novel from 1947, Osamu Dazai notes, “However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water at the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.”
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America defines itself by its future tense as much as Japan does by its past: the Golden Age in Japan—even more than in other elderly cultures—is always behind us. Dazai’s novel about the Land of the Rising Sun, preoccupied with twilight, is called The Setting Sun.
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It’s less that Japan is foreign than that it so often recalls the world that we knew centuries ago. And no one can be sure of whether that’s the past or the present.
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“The front part of the home of a successful Japanese businessman,” Joseph Campbell was told on his way to Japan, “will be in the Western style….But his living quarters will be Japanese and without furniture; and when he returns in the evening, he puts off his Western garb and dons Japanese.”
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Perhaps a society where ancestors are all but indistinguishable from gods is always going to be slow to change. When the twenty-first century began, there were thirty thousand fortune-tellers to be found along the streets of Japan.
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So, too, a culture where gods are believed to live in the very soil, air and waves will not die quickly, since such forces are never quite so perishable as temple and church.
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Besides, a culture used to playing a part can open up to the West in 1853, remake itself on a foreign model in 1945 and still be what it always was, a culture adept at taking things from abroad and making them its own.
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The center of Tokyo, wrote Tanizaki, with precision, is “a medieval castle with mossy walls and banks along its moat, set off against the finest modern buildings.”
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Japan’s unique contribution to the postmodern world, maintains the contemporary Japanese philosopher Takeshi Umehara, is to see that everything is eternal and ephemeral at the same time.
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Japan’s toilets are famous for their ability to measure your urine sugar, to offer air-conditioning, to produce music to cover up a tinkle, even to self-deodorize. But when I go to my gleaming, twenty-second-century local train station, it’s to be confronted by a squat-style “Asian” toilet as primitive and foul-smelling as anything in rural Tibet.
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After he returned from his time in England, Japan’s most beloved novelist—his face once on every thousand-yen note—Soseki devoted his mornings to reading English literature, his afternoons to copying out Chinese poetry. A country that still mixes in every sentence Chinese characters with characters that are transliterations of foreign words can look very much like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.
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“I traveled around Japan these last three years,” says my friend the techno-visionary Kevin Kelly, “and I never saw a single broken roof tile. Not one. On the other hand, I didn’t see much new construction. Maintenance: that’s what Japan does.”
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“Old Japan is dead and gone,” Basil Hall Chamberlain writes at the beginning of his compendious five-hundred-and-sixty-six-page encyclopedia from the turn of the twentieth century, Things Japanese, compiled after decades in the land, “and Young Japan reigns in its stead.” Three sentences later, he adds, “Nevertheless…it [is] abundantly clear to those who have dived beneath the surface of the modern Japanese upheaval that more of the past has been retained than has been let go.”
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Sixty-four pages on, however—proving that he’s Japanese enough to contradict himself constantly as well as British enough to keep making categorical assertions—Chamberlain, an early professor of Japanese at Tokyo University, writes of how “illusory are the common European notions of ‘the unchanging East.’ ”
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It’s common to say, as I have just done, that Japan has long been torn between China and America, as between distant past and future. But as China grows ever more American in its capitalist ways and skyscraper cities, and as America looks ever more to the East to ground itself, Japan ends up ever more confused, not sure whether it’s looking at everything with two faces or with none.
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Perhaps Japan has been losing its soul for so long that it has a lot of soul to lose? Or loss itself is an illusion?
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A country based around the seasons knows, after all, that everything is changing at every moment—three thousand five hundred and seven new restaurants are said to have opened up
in Tokyo alone in 2015—and that fact never changes at all.
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“The contradictions the mind comes up against,” writes Simone Weil, “these are the only realities.”
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A young colleague comes in to Hayao Miyazaki’s space, as shown in a documentary about the filmmaker, delighted that what appears to be the director’s final film, a huge and all-consuming project, is behind them at last. The master animator, in his seventies, smiles and says, “The end is a new beginning.”
THE END, A NEW BEGINNING
Since Japan seems to be in constant motion, we assume that if it’s not necessarily getting any better it must be getting worse. But maybe running in place is precisely how it keeps itself intact?
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